Former CIA boss says Americans are funding the bad guys

Who is it that supports the lavish spending habits of many totalitarian governments that suppress their own people and show open hostility to the West?

James Woolsey, once the CIA director under the Clinton and now a well-connected energy guru, says that every time he fills his car’s gas tank he tilts the rear-view mirror just so to see the culprit who’s supporting several such oil-rich states looking him in the eye.

Of course Saudi Arabia, a favourite target of Woolsey’s, and other such states would see him personally as pretty poor excuse for a sugar-daddy. He drives a Prius modified to run mainly on stored plug-in electricity. He gets 150-200 miles per gallon, so he hardly ever has to fill it up.

But Woolsey notes that oil-addicted Americans collectively spend $2 billion a day of borrowed money to support their habit, and a great deal of it goes to countries that are hostile to Americans. So he thinks his countrymen should join him on the plug-in-powered off-oil bandwagon, the sooner and more vigorously the better.

This wouldn’t necessarily save money, at least not in the short run. Woolsey advocates massive federal spending to support the infrastructure needed for the U.S. to mass produce electric cars and the hard-to-get batteries needed to run them.

But at least infrastructure spending can’t be out-sourced, he notes. It would be spent in the U.S. and create American jobs.

As for the oil-producers who are living high off inflated prices, he recounts how a citizen of one Middle East state accused him of trying to destroy his country.

“I told him we don’t want to destroy you,” Woolsey told a Beyond Oil conference here that was sponsored by the Cascadia Centre of the Discovery Institute. “But we do think it’s time you got a job.”

To read my most recent Vancouver Sun column on other aspects of the conference, click here. And you can also read my blog post and column on the first day’s proceedings here.